Why are we optimizing the case of users browsing bad websites? Why not cater to good websites instead?
Isn't a notification receiver of the most important uses of a phone?
Isn't a notification receiver of the most important uses of a phone?
I would say it's not so much optimizing for good websites vs bad websites, as optimizing for real-world websites.
Real-world websites are overwhelmingly shitty, push dark patterns, invade users' privacy, abuse any APIs they are given access to, etc. Limiting the amount of things they can do is an enhancement to the user experience, even if it's worse for you as a dev.
It's a lot like having to have laws. Why do we have to have laws, isn't that "optimizing for bad people" instead of maximizing the freedom of good people?
For instance, you could forbid websites from requesting the notification permission, but the user could manually go and allow it. It would probably cut 99% of the spam while allowing people that really want notifications to have them. As for the 1% left, we're not talking life and death scenario here, at that point the good outweighs the bad I would say.
Mozilla literally studied this and essentially 100% of "let us spam you" requests were denied.
I agree users don't want notifications from web pages, but the web is much more then just web pages and I would argue that on web applications users are much more likely to allow push notifications if they get a clear benefit.
The web does not have that gate. The web has "I went to the apps website to see if it did what I wanted. it did/didn't, and then asks to send me update notifications"